“It’s not a game,” said Annie. “That was Tucker Crowe. Still is. You can ask him any question about himself, if you want.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Duncan.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I sent you a picture of Tucker Crowe a few weeks ago. You know what he looks like. He doesn’t look like a retired accountant.”
“That wasn’t him. That was his neighbor John. Also known as Fake Tucker, or Fucker, because of a misunderstanding that people like you have spread all over the Internet.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. So how did you meet ‘Tucker Crowe,’ actually?”
“He e-mailed me about that review of
“E-mailed you.”
“Yes.”
“You post up one piece and you get an e-mail from Tucker Crowe.”
“Listen, Duncan, Tucker and Jackson are standing here and it’s cold and…”
“Jackson.”
“Tucker’s son.”
“Oh, he’s got a son now, has he? And where did he appear from?”
“You know how babies are made, Duncan. Anyway. You saw a picture of Jackson on my fridge.”
“I saw a picture of your retired accountant and his grandson on your fridge. This is a circuitous argument.”
“It’s not an argument. Listen, I’ll call you later. You can come round for tea if you want. Bye.”
And she hung up on him.
Ros had worked hard over the couple of days Annie had spent in London. The day before she left, the two of them had gone over to Terry Jackson’s house to rummage through his collection of Gooleness memorabilia and had ended up taking most of it, in the absence of anything else to show; Terry’s wife, denied the use of a spare bedroom for the whole of her married life because of all the old bus tickets and newspapers, was insisting that it was a gift, not a loan. Terry had been unable to provide any kind of budget for the exhibition, so they were using anything they had on hand—old photo frames, unused dusty cases—to display his stuff. A lot of it was still in garbage bags, a conservation decision that would get them thrown out of the Museums Association if anyone ever found out.
“Gross,” said Jackson, when Annie showed him the eye.
Annie admired his determination to say the right things, but the eye didn’t really stare at you, in the way that Annie and Ros had hoped it might, mostly because it didn’t really look like an eye any longer, unfortunately. They had decided to keep it in the exhibition because of what it said about the people of Gooleness, rather than what it said about sharks, although they would not be explaining their decision to the people of Gooleness.
Tucker liked Terry’s Stones poster, though, and he loved the photograph of the four pals on their day out at the seaside.
“Why does it make me feel sad?” he said. “Even though they’re happy? I mean, sure, they’re all old or dead now. But it’s more than that, I think.”
“I have exactly the same reaction. It’s because their leisure time was so precious, I think. We have so much, by comparison, and we get to do so much more with it. When I first saw it, I’d just had this three-week holiday trekking around the U.S., and…” She stopped.
“What?”
“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know about that, either.”
“What?”
“My American holiday.”
“No,” said Tucker. “But then, we only met recently. There are probably a few holidays I need to catch up on.”
“But this one should have come up in the full disclosure section of our conversation.”
“Why?”
“We went to Bozeman, Montana. And the site of some studio that isn’t there anymore in Memphis. And Berkeley. And the toilet in the Pits Club in Minneapolis…”
“Shit, Annie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why did you go with him?”
“It seemed like as good a way of seeing America as any. I enjoyed it.”
“You went to San Francisco to stand outside Julie Beatty’s house?”
“Ah. No. Not guilty. I let him get on with it. I went to San Francisco to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and to do some shopping.”
“So this guy Duncan… he’s like a real stalker.”
“I suppose he is.”
For a moment, Annie felt a little pang of envy. It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted Duncan to stalk her, exactly. She didn’t want to see him hiding behind her hedge, or ducking behind a supermarket aisle when she was doing her shopping. But she wouldn’t have minded if he’d had the same appetite for her that he’d shown for Tucker. She had only just realized that the man talking to her now was much more of a rival than another woman could ever be.
Duncan poured himself an orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Gina.”
“Yes, my sweet.”
She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the
“What do you think are the chances of Tucker Crowe being in Gooleness?”
She looked at him.
“
“Yes.”
“
“Yes.”
“I’d say the chances were very slim indeed. Why? Do you think you just saw him?”
“Annie says I did.”
“Annie says you did.”
“Yes.”
“Well, without knowing why she said it, I’d have to say that she’s winding you up.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Why did she tell you that? It seems quite a peculiar thing to say. And quite cruel, given your… interests.”
“I was jogging along the beach, and she was there with a, a respectable-looking middle-aged man and a young boy. And I stopped, and introduced myself to the man, and he said he was Tucker Crowe.”
“That must have been a bit of a shock to you.”
“I just couldn’t understand why she made him say it. I mean, it’s not very clever. Or funny. And then I just called her from the bedroom before my shower and she’s sticking to her story.”
“Did he look like Tucker Crowe?”
“No. Not at all.”
They found their eyes straying over to the mantel-piece, and the photograph he’d brought with him when he’d moved in: Tucker onstage, maybe at the Bottom Line, sometime in the late seventies. Duncan could feel the beginnings of another little panic, rather like the panic he’d felt the other night when he was talking to Gina about
